Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for The Chair Company S1E3, “@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little Bit of Hollywood? Okayyy” (written by Gary Richardson and directed by Andrew DeYoung).
As S1E3 of The Chair Company opens, we start off exactly where last week ended, as Ron (Tim Robinson) receives the picture from the closet of him sitting on the chair in the family room as his extended family excitedly prepares for a rousing game of Twister. He reaches for the slightly ajar door of the closet and opens it, to find a very short man hiding amongst the clothes. The man tackles Ron out of the closet and makes a run for it out of the house, with Ron in hot pursuit. As he nearly catches the man on a median, Mike (Joseph Tudisco) roars up in his car, yelling that the man is his guy. Ron angrily confronts Mike about the man hiding in his house, and the man sheepishly says that he texted Mike instead of Ron. Mike tells the man that he’s drunk again, to which he agrees.
Ron turns on Mike, asking him why he put “a little guy” in his closet. Mike says he just assigned him to watch Ron: he hit Ron with a pipe, Ron found him, and he was worried Ron was going to set him up. In bewilderment, Ron counters that Mike tried to give him a gun, and that he needs to stay away from his family. Mike tells him that he found something out.
They go into Ron’s garage, where Mike reveals that after Ron angrily exited his car earlier that night, he went to see Jim X anyway, and learned that Jim X is going to see a guy that Mike knows. This guy owes Mike money, and was paid $50k to have Mike scare Ron, far above what it would normally cost, which means someone really wants to get to Ron and hurt him. The tension is broken by the little drunk man starting to kick and slap around boxes in the garage, punctuated by a brief moment where it appears that he’s about to reveal something, before continuing to try to kick boxes and being thrown out by Mike.
Ron returns to the house, where Barb (Lake Bell) mouths “Where the f*ck were you?” In bed later that night, Ron wakes up, goes downstairs and starts violently shoving a broomstick into the closets to ensure that the little drunk man isn’t hiding again. The next morning, sitting downstairs, Ron asks his wife if they can install a security system because “an intruder with a gun could come in here and make us do whatever he wanted.” After a darkly funny back-and-forth, Barb relents.
At work, Ron is talking with a couple of contractors, one of whom notices a small bug crawling into the charging port of Ron’s phone. He tells Ron, “A bug went into your phone…there’s a roach in your iPhone now.” After the meeting, Ron searches for the address he found on the sticker on the back of the Tecca chair he saw in the photograph. When it produces no results with a message that queries are in-person only, Ron prepares to leave until Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara) stops him so they can all watch his TV interview. Ron is suddenly distracted by Douglas (Jim Downey) whispering something to a coworker. At the conclusion of the screening, Douglas approaches Ron to inform him that he’s throwing a party, and Ron’s not invited, because people need to have fun without the boss there. It’s a “making mistakes” party involving green and yellow wristbands which will be worn based on the wearer’s readiness to make a mistakes. The conversation over this stupid idea is interrupted by a phone call from Barb, who is concerned about the money Ron is spending on the security system (there it is: Ron spending more money that will likely go nowhere).
At the County Recorder’s Office, Ron is given a form to fill out to get a copy of the deed to the address he was looking for, but writes Douglas’s name on the form. Unfortunately, the interview with his name on the screen is showing at the office, and across the room, the clerk is talking to her boss in an apparently tense conversation, even pointing in Ron’s direction. The clerk returns to the desk, stating that she just got into a lot of trouble…because she smells bad.
Anyway, the clerk tells Ron that he’s a lot nicer than the last person to check out this deed. Ron distracts the clerk long enough to take a picture of the computer screen, and leaves with a copy of the deed, which reveals that the owner of the address is RBMG, Inc. A Google search leads to Red Ball Market Global. He calls the number on the website, and while on hold, digs down into the site to find a staff picture in front of the large red ball he saw in the abandoned building in the pilot. Still on hold three hours later, he brings the printed-out pictures of the executives to Mike. He also reveals that he tracked down the name of the “mean” person who checked out the deed before him (from the photo he took of the computer). Mike says he’ll look into it, and later, after five hours on hold and a few drinks with Mike, the latter convinces Ron to call NBS (Tecca handler) and threaten them with the knowledge that he knows about RBMG.
Ron gets a notification from the security system and sees his son Seth (Will Price) outside the house drinking a six pack of beer. Returning home, Ron leaves a glass of water and a note saying they need to talk on his son’s bedside table. The next morning, Ron has a text from Seth to meet up, and a missed call, possibly from Tecca. Ron meets up with his son, who admits to his drinking and asks that Barb not find out. Ron says he won’t tell her, but makes sure that Seth isn’t drinking out of depression, and tells him that he’s always there for him.
Mike found the “mean guy” who checked out the deed before Ron, so they go to visit him. The man slams his door, yelling that worked for Tecca (but doesn’t now) and he’s “not going to do it anymore” before screaming like a madman. Waiting outside the house, the two see the man leave, and decide to break into the house. Inside the messy, TLC-worthy house, they find stacks of papers and an old woman lying in a pile of trash yelling for popcorn. They notice a camera on the wall and panic, hearing a pounding upstairs. They grab the papers they can and run. A woman comes downstairs and watches them leave.
At home, Barb confronts Ron and tells him that she sees him coming in and out of the house at all hours and knows that he’s hiding something. Ron breaks down, and instead of revealing his Tecca investigation, admits that he caught Seth drinking. He asks that Barb not confront him about it, saying that he’s got it under control.
At a meeting the next day involving whether or not the new mall should involve football (a cultural staple of the community and a sticking point to the development of the mall), the owner of the house Ron broke into shows up outside the glass doors, pointing at Ron. Ron goes out to confront the man, who yells about Ron taking his papers. The man also says that he worked at Tecca for four days, nakedly assembling and disassembling chairs, and recognizes the CFO Ken Tucker from a photo Ron shows him. Ron gives the man his number, and promises to return the papers if he can give him any information.
Ron gets a notification from his security system: it’s an office chair outside his house. Weird enough, but weirder is a figure wearing a black hoodie with the hood up and a Jason Vorhees mask suddenly stepping into frame, sitting in the chair and rapidly tilting his head back and forth, looking at the camera. We end there.
This week wasn’t quite as eventful as last week, but that bit with the Jason mask definitely ended the episode on a startling note. Given how things have been going so far, we’ll probably find out pretty quickly who is behind the mask, but that will just unravel things further.
